As communications technology has evolved over the past decades, business and social environments have begun utilizing a number of applications to share information. These information sharing applications, such as, but not limited to email, chat rooms, other forms of text messaging, file sharing (e.g., document sharing, audio file sharing, photo sharing, video sharing), and collaborative document editing, have become ubiquitous in many business and social settings. Users have found these applications to be fast, reliable, and affordable means for sharing information. In particular, these applications have been quite useful in situations where numerous individuals are sharing information, and participating individuals are located at different geographic locations.
With an array of options for sharing information at a user's disposal, many users have begun to multitask with respect to information sharing. In this regard, a single user may participate, or at least be available to participate, in a variety of information sharing mechanisms simultaneously. For example, in social settings it has become common for a user to be present in multiple chat rooms simultaneously and interact with different individuals in each chat room with regard to different topics. As another example, an individual may be present in a chat room that may be tied to a collaboratively edited document such that the members in the chat room may communicate as changes are being made to the document, and meanwhile the same individual may be present in a screen sharing session directed to a different topic, where an interactive presentation is being performed. By multitasking in this manner a user may be able to efficiently interact with multiple individuals at various geographic locations simultaneously with regard to different topics.
However, in order to multitask in this manner, an individual may need to consistently monitor numerous information sharing applications, or instances of numerous information sharing applications, in which the user has a presence. Further, there may be times when the topic being discussed by members of a chat room or the portion of a document being collaboratively edited may not be of interest to a user. A user may be forced to monitor information that is not of interest to the user, to determine when information is being shared that would be of interest to the user. Monitoring information sharing applications in this manner may become quite tedious, and ultimately degrade the efficiencies that can be realized by being able to multitask.